Clarence Song
The project began with a non descript building on the aptly named “Industrial Highway” in Ann Arbor. The facility is almost out of a box: a 60x100 concrete clock building, with some brick on the side facing the road, covering what was once a garage door. While completely lacking in character, for our purposes it is suitable as a blank canvas of sorts.
Again, as seen in the isometric projections, elevations, and sections, the building is basically unremarkable. Inside, a few walls separated the retail section from storage and loading rooms, a bathroom, and a small office. A loading area in the rear, with a large (14’) garage opening, provides ample access.
The parts required to assemble a building of this type are few and straightforward. This Knolled diagram contains almost all of the required pieces that went into its shell, minus the hardware. Besides the concrete block, large I-beams, and aluminum wrapping, the roof appears to be surfaced in TPO, or thermoplastic polyolefin, which reflects light and keeps the interior cooler.
Pulling together unlikely items in jewelry and coffee, and then casting them in a situation utilizing stages, and the overall form of a void, the project evolved into the rendering of a simple allegory. Beginning with an excavation, a kind of basement with a sheer 33 foot drop was created as a metaphor for a diamond mine. This device is envisioned as a place where jewelry can be cleaned, while patrons enjoy exotic and expensive coffees. But the structure also serves as an exhibition space in which another story is told.
These perspective images describe the descent, in reverse order, that patrons make into the “mine”. The top floor represents captured space, be it colonial, or neo-colonial: regions of the Global South that historically and persistently are mined for their wealth. It’s simultaneously a passage down the ladders of occupation, class, sex, and race. Here the meaning of the project becomes clearer: that people, fueled by caffeine, and drafted into the service of global consumption, are transformed into objects themselves: things captured, rendered, and placed in boxes, where they live out nameless and invisible lives, often marked by drudgery and toil.
Movement begins benignly enough, as the brightly painted top floor opens up in a minimalist mezzanize of sorts onto the vast and dark chasm below. That simplicity of design reflects the scarcity which gives gems, oil, and rare earth added value, a condition supported not just by the so’called free market, but cartels and monopolies. Color is a crude metaphor here, transitioning from the white trusses to the charcoal floor in the abyss, and sadly appropriate. Jewelry is washed in marble basins that are miniatures of the diamond mine, which is based on Maya Lin’s poorly received but viscerally moving Vietnam War Memorial. Once fueled and energized, patrons are invited to step out on a walkway from which they can view the classes of workers that dwell below, those ordinarily visible, like managers, and those more likely to be hidden from sight, partly owing to the work of traditional architecture. Descent follows the sides of the structure, along blackened rock walls festooned with faux diamonds. While inclusive principles of design are the basis for the ramp, set at a pitch of 1:20, with generously cantilevered, 10 foot paths, there is no mistaking the similarity to Botticelli’s vivid illustrations of Dante’s Inferno.
Passing the various workers, displayed in bulletproof glass for comfortable viewing, patrons are confronted by, but also shielded from, the workers who support their way of life, and global capital itself. With each passing turn into the darkess, they pass a lower and less visible tier of humanity, eventually arriving at the very bottom of the pit, where those tasked with backbreaking, dangerous maintenance and labor reside.
Looking up, looking down, to the side, up and down again. Humans are sometimes objects, but rarely bereft of feeling, or longing. For the lowly worker buried in obscurity, a shaft of light is a reminder that another life, a different future maybe, is possible. From the heights of wealth, one is undoubtedly more comfortable, but awkwardly perched, precariously, subject to identical conditions of loneliless, sickness, and death. We have constructed a world in which suffering is accepted, and hidden, and people are alientated, anxious, and depressed. This project seeks to reveal these constant and defining elements that accompany our activities, our fractured global family, and our architecture.